‘Don’t you fret yourselves, any of you,’ he said decidedly. ‘Auntie Anna isn’t going to make things pleasant for anybody in this house–not she! Hasn’t she persuaded father to do whatever she likes, all our lives?’
‘What is she going to make him do now, then?’ asked Wilfred, who did not mean to give up his dream of a laboratory without a protest.
‘First of all,’ said Christopher, with an air of confidence, ‘she’ll see that Egbert has a crammer next summer holidays; and he’ll either have to get that scholarship, or he doesn’t go to Oxford at all! She’ll talk about discipline, and things like that. Aunts always do talk about discipline, when it’s for other people’s children.’
‘I wish you’d shut up,’ grumbled Egbert, returning to his book. ‘How is a fellow to read when you’re making such a clatter?’
‘Then there’s Peter,’ continued Christopher, calmly. ‘Of course she’ll say he’s much too young to be trusted with a gun, though he is such an overgrown, hulking chap; and why isn’t he in the fifth instead of the upper fourth, at his age?’
‘What do you know about it, you youngest-but-two?’ shouted Peter, wrathfully.
Kit peered at him through his spectacles, and went on as impudently as ever. He was never afraid to speak his mind, for none of the others would have dreamed of laying a finger, except in fun, on the one brother who was not strong enough to defend himself; and Kit knew this, as well as he knew his superiority over them in the matter of brains. The only wonder was that the knowledge had not made him a prig. Perhaps it would have been difficult, though, in the hurly-burly of the Berkeley family, for any one to have been a prig.
‘As for Wilfred,’ he resumed, ‘she’ll upset all his ambitions before he can turn round. Do you suppose she’ll encourage his messing about with things in saucepans, just because he wants to be a doctor? Not she! She’ll talk about some rotten business in the City instead. Aunts always know millions of places in the City where they can shove their unwilling nephews.’
‘Oh, I say, dry up!’ objected Wilfred, who was already sufficiently depressed by the discovery that the brew in the saucepan was not a success.
‘Then she’ll pack Robin off to a preparatory at Brighton–never knew an aunt yet who didn’t want to send you to a preparatory at Brighton!–and she’ll do the same to me, only she’ll choose a beastly inferior place, where I shall be looked after by some woman,’ concluded Christopher, in a tone of scorn. Then he caught sight of Barbara, who was still standing thoughtfully in the middle of the room; and he shook his head at her pityingly. ‘After that, having cleared the house of boys, she’ll turn her attention to the Babe,’ he said, and paused rather abruptly.